Tag: How to

In my previous post, I provided a high-level component overview of the AWS VPC construct. I also hinted on a multi-part guide on how to create a VPC and ultimately connect it to your on-prem environment. This post is the first part of this guide. At the end, you should understand how to create a VPC, assign subnets, and associate subnets to a route table.

The private network within the IBM Cloud is always assigned an address from a 10.X subnet. As a result, accessing the IBM Cloud network from addresses outside the 10.X range may prove to be a challenge since the network will drop packets from an unrecognized address. For example, if you created an IPsec VPN from your on-prem environment that is assigned a 192.X address, you will not be able to reach vCenter or any other VLAN-backed 10.X address resident on the IBM Cloud private network. The same is true for VXLAN-backed virtual machines assigned addresses outside of the IBM Cloud address space. This is why we must use NAT.

I get many questions from our field teams and clients on how to connect to an on-prem environment to a VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) instance deployed in the IBM Cloud. While there are a few hardware options available within the IBM Cloud catalog (e.g., Fortinet and Vyatta), I typically recommend the use of an NSX Edge Services Gateway (ESG) to terminate VPN connections. There are cases where other devices might be more suitable, but I’ll save that discussion for another post. In this post, I will show you how to terminate a IPsec connection to a VCF instance deployed in IBM Cloud using an NSX ESG. I’ll be using the public internet as my connection medium. This is fine for a proof-of-concept, but you’ll want to use IBM’s direct connection options for production.